The decontamination is part of a scheduled programme to make Salisbury and Amesbury safer.

Work is starting on decontamination work at the home of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire Council has confirmed.

The decontamination work at the Skripal property is part of a scheduled programme of ongoing work to make Salisbury and Amesbury safe for its residents and visitors.

The work is being planned and overseen by Defra in partnership with Wiltshire Council and carried out by specialist military teams.

Skripal and his daughter Yulia were left critically ill after being exposed to the military grade nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in March.

On Wednesday, two Russian nationals – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – said to be members of Russia’s military intelligence service the GRU, were identified as suspects by police investigating the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal in March.

Theresa May told MPs that “this was not a rogue operation” and would “almost certainly” have been approved at a “senior level of the Russian state”.

She told the Commons CCTV evidence “clearly” places the two Russians in the vicinity of the Skripals’ house shortly before the attack on them.

Officers have formally linked the attack on the Skripals to events in nearby Amesbury when Dawn Sturgess, 44, and her partner Charlie Rowley, 45, were exposed to the same nerve agent.

Sturgess died in hospital in July, just over a week after the pair fell ill.